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An In-Store Music Mystery

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Last month, an episode of the podcast Reply All aired that included a music mystery. Brian, the protagonist, recorded a jazzy version of a Christmas song with his friends, burned a few CDs, and uploaded it to YouTube. After views (and listens) never broke double-digits, he forgot about the song. And then, months later, he hears his song playing over the speakers as he shops in a major grocery store chain.

It’s a fun episode, and you should listen to it before reading any further into this post. I’ll end up spoiling it for you. Here you go:

Interesting, eh? The mystery is unsolved. The first question is: how would anyone get ahold of the song? It’s verified that Brian or his friends did not distribute the song through a service like CD Baby. Someone would need the CD or, more likely, the ability to rip music from YouTube. Next: How did the song get into the grocery store? At first, it’s naïvely thought that an employee played the music, but major stores all use music services like Mood Media (who now own Muzak, which you’ve heard of). This is mostly for licensing and rights purposes — it saves the stores from having to individually clear the rights to play music in a commercial establishment.1This leads to a fascinating discussion in the podcast about how the services select music for in-store play. For example, a song’s tempo should resemble the rate a shopper is pushing a cart down an aisle. Seriously, listen to the podcast if you haven’t. But a service like Mood Media would only acquire music submitted to them. This submission could happen directly or through a distributor like CD Baby.

There’s also an Occam’s razor theory that Brian misheard the music in the store and mistook it for his song. He’s given some entertaining tests to find out how well he can identify music. Brian passes with flying colors — he’s got an exceptional ear.

There are other theories thrown about, like the unlikely idea that the music service is pirating Christmas songs to avoid paying royalties. When you think about it, that’s more trouble than it’s worth — a large company isn’t going to spend time trawling YouTube and ripping songs, and if caught, the penalties and reputational harm would be enormous.

The episode ends with a big shrug. The case of the errant Christmas song remains a mystery. The hosts thought through every possible theory, and each is flat-out wrong or unverifiable. 

But I have a theory. It’s a theory that’s not touched on in the episode. And, if Brian did hear his song, I bet I’m on to something. I wrote the Reply All team to let them know my idea. Here’s what I told them:

My guess is the song was indeed unscrupulously downloaded and put into circulation. But it wasn’t the music supplier who did this. The clue was when the representative asked if the song could be available from an aggregator like CD Baby.

Let me now give you two examples that will help illustrate my theory:

Check out this article about a ‘music artist’ grabbing songs that don’t have many plays, downloading them, and then releasing them as his own (via 5 Magazine). 

And on my blog, I wrote about Kevin MacLeod, who makes music and lets people use it for free in their YouTube videos in exchange for credit. But then someone downloaded his songs and, claiming to be him, registered them with YouTube’s Content ID. This unsavory person was able to monetize the videos that are using Kevin’s music.

So, here’s my theory: Someone is searching YouTube looking for Xmas songs with very low play counts. I’m sure there’s a lot of unreleased, amateur Christmas music on YouTube. And, the lower the play count, the less likely anyone uncovers this scheme. This individual then downloads the songs using a stream-ripper and then collects them into a Christmas ‘album.’ Then this ‘album’ is sent to a service like CD Baby or directly to an in-store music service. The ‘album’ is released under this individual’s name — not Brian’s — to get royalties and payments from places like major grocery store chains for plays.

That said, two factors do *not* support this theory. First, I played the song off the YouTube video for Shazam. A distributor like CD Baby would usually give the music to Shazam’s database. When I tried Shazam, it either could not identify the song or misidentified it. (There was one version of the same song that Shazam suggested that had a very similar piano style, but no drums or sax.)

Another factor is YouTube’s Content ID, as mentioned above. Like Shazam, most distributors would make their aggregated music available to Content ID. If that were the case, Brian’s original video would get flagged.

But we could be dealing with someone who does this kind of thing *a lot* and knows what they are doing. Some distributors will let the artist tell them which outlets to supply music to and which to exclude. I would guess CD Baby and Distrokid offer this option. So, if the individual who ripped this music is explicitly targeting in-store play outlets and the royalties from those, the distributor could be told only to give the music to in-store play music suppliers. In other words, no Spotify, no Shazam, no Content ID. Thus, there’s even less chance to discover this scheme.

The individual could also have a direct account with the in-store music supplier, bypassing normal distribution channels (and thus also Shazam and Content ID). If that’s the case, this person does this a lot — the in-store music services will only deal directly with labels and artists submitting content regularly. 

This secret person could be a ‘professional’ — supplying lots of unreleased holiday music ripped from YouTube, repeatedly played over the season (which, as noted in the podcast episode, is getting longer and longer), and collecting royalties. 

That’s my theory, but I suppose we’ll never know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Digital Evolution of Bootleg Culture

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When I owned a record store in the early ‘90s, a guy would pull up in his van once a month and hawk a selection of bootleg CDs. These discs contained recordings of live concerts, out-of-print rarities, and unreleased demos of your favorite band. I admit that I bought and sold more than a few, as the super-fans prized these limited (and often high-priced) CDs. It was a small scene — though morally precarious the distribution of these discs was regulated by extreme scarcity.

Napster and other file-sharing sites eliminated the scarcity, to a degree, but access was still for those ‘in-the-know.’ But as the internet crossed the chasm, technical inexperience was less-and-less a barrier to finding the unreleased stuff.

Distribution barriers have also crumbled — overwhelmingly a positive development — and pay-to-distribute services like Distrokid and CD Baby now supply releases to streaming platforms with minimal vetting. More-and-more of these instant-distribution services are popping up, with Spotify recently announcing their own direct-to-platform portal.

It’s not surprising that these technological advancements have bolstered seedier elements. That’s the story of the internet, and bootleg culture’s exploitation of the available tools is inevitable. Both scarcity and exclusivity of access have been eliminated, and so we can probably get used to episodes like this (via Music Business Worldwide):

The two [bootleg Beyoncé] albums, released under the name “Queen Carter,” were on Spotify and Apple Music for around a day, long enough to generate furious traction from Beyoncé fans on social media, before being taken down. And the albums came out shortly after R&B star SZA also “released” music under a fake name (“Sister Solana”) that turned out to be stolen demos as well.

Soundrop, an independent DIY distribution service through which both Beyoncé and SZA’s tracks were apparently uploaded via different accounts, says it is working with authorities in an investigation into the “potential intellectual property theft” and that it took down the music as soon as it was aware that it breached the company’s terms of service.

… and then there’s this, via Film School Rejects:

[The movie] One Cut of the Dead should never have been on Amazon Prime to begin with. In an email to Film School Rejects, Third Window Films owner Adam Torel confirmed that the film had not been uploaded by either his company or Nikkatsu, the organization in charge of sales for the Asian marketplace. “I saw some posts on Twitter saying it was available on Amazon Prime in both the US and UK,” Torel explained. “Considering the UK theatrical [release] is January 4th, and as it was very hard to get an Asian independent film into cinemas, you can imagine how much I started to panic and fear for my chances of getting Asian indies into cinemas from now on.” […]

For many, this was an ugly introduction to Amazon Prime’s dual nature as both a streaming platform for Amazon’s high-profile acquisitions and a self-distribution platform with little oversight. “Amazon has this whole section that effectively operates like YouTube,” explains Todd Brown, head of international acquisitions for XYZ Films, “and is governed by the same laws as YouTube, which really absolves Amazon of a lot of responsibility for what people do on the platform — but, from the outside looking in, appears almost exactly the same as the fully Amazon-controlled, curated service.”

There is a delicate balance between ease-of-access (and democratization of distribution) and the illicit exploitation of these tools. On the one hand, it’s incredible that anyone can have a self-released film on Amazon Prime next to Hollywood blockbusters. I’m 100% in favor of that. On the other, IP owners may be looking at an endless game of whack-a-mole on platforms with the perceived legitimacy of, say, Apple Music. That’s troubling.

The services, both on the distribution and DSP sides, should look at a robust method for spotting these oversights. Ideally, there would be an independent watchdog organization that worked with all DSPs to remove infringing or bootleg content. Of course, that will never happen because there’s no one to pay for it, and there’s no money to be made. The more conspiratorial of you may argue that actively eliminating this content is seen as money lost, explaining the lackadaisical takedown environment. But reputation and authority are at stake. In the short-term, the profits matter, especially to shareholders, but the absence of prestige and position will create destructive long-term problems. Just ask Facebook.

Which brings us to Beatport and the logical next step in the evolution of the digital bootleg. 5 Mag has been reporting on a ‘prolific’ dance music producer who isn’t simply plagiarizing — he’s releasing other artists’ material as his own. And he’s been doing it unimpeded for at least a decade:

Incredibly, it appears [Flavio] Lodetti’s alleged plagiarism was first discovered when Lodetti sent demos of stolen tracks to the person who made them. On January 7, Gábor Szeles, proprietor of Witty Tunes, posted a warning on Facebook addressed to label managers and producers that “an artist called FLOD” was claiming other people’s work as his own. […]

Multiple producers have posted screencaps of their inboxes with a “flood” (sorry) of emails from Lodetti submitting a half-dozen or more demos at a time. Apparently quite a few bit: new tracks from Lodetti are still being identified and traced to earlier releases from other producers as we speak. “Unfortunately as a result of this post I double checked the upcoming single I signed from Flod and as you would expect it’s a stolen track from 2015,” one label manager wrote in the comments of Szeles’ post. “There’s not even any changes made to it.”

I’ve heard of this happening before but not at the scale that Lodetti has achieved. A follow-up by 5 Mag confirms that a release as far back as 2010 was a master recording stolen outright from another producer. How widespread is this practice? I fear it’s more common than we imagine, and extends to all the independent platforms — Bandcamp, Traxsource, etc.

It’s curious that Beatport doesn’t have a Content ID-like tool in place to identify the resemblance of newly submitted tracks to releases already on the platform. Beatport may see the problem as infrequent, thus not warranting the investment. But, again, there are numerous examples of pirated tracks showing up on Beatport in the past — tongues are wagging on dance music producer forums — and it’s going to get worse. Lodetti’s exposure may shame him into obscurity, but, as with the One Cut of the Dead and Queen Carter incidents above, it also shows how easy this is to pull off without much repercussion.

The Upside of Music Piracy

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For a legacy act, taking a nuanced stance on the effects of music piracy is surprising and somewhat brave. But that’s what Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell is doing in a recent interview with Ultimate Classic Rock:

“The way the band works is quite extraordinary. In recent years, we’ve been really fortunate that we’ve seen this new surge in our popularity. For the most part, that’s fueled by younger people coming to the shows,” Campbell said. “We’ve been seeing it for the last 10, 12 or 15 years, you’d notice younger kids in the audience, but especially in the last couple of years, it’s grown exponentially. I really do believe that this is the upside of music piracy.”


Techdirt has some thoughts:

This is the part of music obtained freely that never gets mentioned: the multiplier effect it has on a bands relevance and longevity. This isn’t to say that such a model works for every band in every instance, but it’s refreshing to see an artist step back and try to get the full picture of what’s really going on here. It would be quite easy for someone like Campbell to see the young faces in his audience and never give a second thought to how those younger fans got to a Def Leppard concert. By taking an intelligent look at that question, however, Campbell has reached a place where he’s found a friend where he might have seen an enemy.


It is extraordinary how attitudes are changing across the board as larger artists begin to find advantage in the new music paradigm. (When it comes to topics like this, I wonder how much influence Bob Lefsetz is having on classic rockers.) The only question I might have: is music piracy still a concern when it comes to younger audiences? Are teenagers and fans in their 20s still downloading files? As statistics show streaming gaining traction at an accelerating rate, one might assume Daniel Ek’s mission to eliminate piracy might be paying off.

Another side of the coin: Def Leppard are active on YouTube and engage on social media, regularly posting new content, which is also rare for a legacy band. Though Campbell’s perspective is refreshing, he may be off-base about the reality of what is mostly driving young fans to his band’s concerts.


Update: Music 3.0 blog also asks Does Music Piracy Still Exist In The Age Of Streaming?

Streaming’s Two-Sided Effect on Downloads

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TorrentFreak:

From the beginning, one of the key software engineers at Spotify has been Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent, so clearly the company already knew a lot about file-sharers. In the early days the company was fairly open about its aim to provide an alternative to piracy, but perhaps one of the earliest indications of growing success came when early invites were shared among users of private torrent sites.



“People that are pirating music and not paying for it, they are the ones we want on our platform. It’s important for us to be reaching these individuals that have never paid for music before in their life, and get them onto a service that’s legal and gives money back to the rights holders,” {Spotify Australia managing director Kate} Vale said.



Of course, hardcore pirates aren’t always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, {General Counsel of Spotify Horacio} Gutierrez says. “I think one just has to look at data to recognize that the freemium model for online music consumption works.”



Spotify’s general counsel {also} says that the company is enjoying success, not only by bringing pirates onboard, but also by converting them to premium customers via a formula that benefits everyone in the industry.



The Guardian:

The digital download, ushered in to the mass market more than a decade ago by Apple’s iTunes music store, is in rapid decline as people shift to streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.



So how much longer do downloads have? A few years and they’re dead, says Mark Mulligan, music analyst at Midia Consulting: “It’s going to die before the CD. The CD has a fairly universal player, where there’s always at least one in a house. And the people who grew up buying CDs are the older music consumers – the CD will literally die out only when they do.”



“There’s no end date … our music iTunes business is doing very well,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of internet software and services, told Billboard magazine in June. “Downloads weren’t growing, and certainly are not going to grow again, but it’s not declining anywhere near as fast as any of them [in record labels] predicted. There are a lot of people who download music and are happy with it and they’re not moving towards subscriptions.”



But in the long run, streaming is the only game in town – along, perhaps, with the CD and vinyl. The download once looked like the future; now, the question is how much more of a future it has.

On Exclusives and Windowing

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Jonathan Galkin, Co-Founder of DFA Records, in PIAS Blog:

“All of these ‘streaming exclusives’ are for the 1%. This is not my fight. It sort of feels awful all around, regardless of the scale of the artist. It’s like having to join a gym in order to buy a pair of sneakers.

“This is the least democratic way to hear discuss and enjoy new music. It shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt to find an album, and albums shouldn’t be used as bait to build tech companies.

“But, you know, good for Kanye and Drake and Beyonce. But it leaves little room to focus on the discovery of new music, which is what DFA is all about.”

Music Business Worldwide:

Per Sundin (Universal): “It’s exactly what happened in the US with physical product. Best Buy said, we’re going to buy 2m AC/DC albums, and it was: ‘Wow, 2m albums.’ But eventually when you looked at the real record stores, the Towers that closed and others, you’re killing the people who feed you.”

Mark Dennis (Sony): “It’s the wrong thing, without a doubt. People who believe that exclusives are going to bring the market forward are the most naive people in the world. We have to learn from what’s happened in the past: when people haven’t been able to consume music in the way they want, they turn to piracy. We’re just not learning! We’ve got to be realistic. What will move the market forward is having content across all platforms, giving the consumer the ability to make their decision and use great products.”

So, not much love for streaming exclusives. However, windowing may soon have a new champion. Via Music Ally:

With no free tier, Apple Music has been able to pitch itself as a premium-only option for album releases, as has Tidal. SoundCloud, meanwhile, made premium-windowing part of the industry pitch for its recently-launched SoundCloud Go subscription tier.

Sources have told Music Ally that Spotify was in advanced discussions with Radiohead’s management company Courtyard and label XL Recordings about a deal to make A Moon Shaped Pool the first album to be windowed to premium subscribers on the service.

“We are always looking for new ways to create a better experience for our free and paying listeners, and to maximise the value of both tiers for artists and their labels. We explored a variety of ways to do that in conjunction with the release of Radiohead’s latest album,” said {Jonathan} Prince {of Spotify}.

“Some of the approaches we explored with Radiohead were new, and we ultimately decided that we couldn’t deliver on those approaches technologically in time for the album’s release schedule.”

Reading between the lines of Prince’s statement, it seems that this is less a case of getting cold feet about premium windowing, and more a case of Spotify wanting to make sure the technology to make it work was robust.

How File-Sharing Affects Album Sales (c. 2008)

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Billboard:

In a study called “Purchase, Pirate, Publicize: The Effect of File Sharing on Album Sales,” Jonathan Lee of Queen’s University in Ontario monitored both the sales and pirated downloads of 2,251 albums… from 2008. (For some perspective, that’s the same year that Spotify arrived in the U.S.) Legitimate album sales data came from Nielsen SoundScan, while file sharing stats were pulled from a BitTorrent tracker. “From the results, I conclude that file sharing activity has a statistically significant but economically modest negative effect on legitimate music sales,” he writes.



He added, “But the results can also inform business and policy decisions in the market for music and for other media as well. Trade groups such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) spend considerable effort and resources to deter piracy and shut down file sharing networks like the one studied in this paper. If the effect of file sharing on sales is small, this expense may not be worth it. The results of this paper should help to inform such cost–benefit analysis by trade groups, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers.”



TorrentFreak:

One of the downsides is that the data itself is relatively old, from 2008, and the music industry has changed a lot since then. This means that the results may have been different today. Also, it’s worth noting that the download numbers come from a BitTorrent tracker that counts a relatively high share of music aficionados. They may also act differently than the general file-sharer.



Complete Music Update:

{According to the study,} while file-sharing activity had a negative impact on CD sales, the word-of-mouth marketing power of the file-sharing community actually aided legit download sales. Perhaps suggesting that file-sharers were quick to shun physical products as file-sharing became an option, but they nevertheless used the file-sharing networks – to an extent at least – as a try-before-you-buy platform.



Lee adds that the extent to which the marketing power of file-sharing offset lost CD sales varied according to the level of artists, with “bottom tier” acts losing out the most. Though, the researcher ponders that this might be because their music wasn’t as attractive to file-sharers who were trying before they buy, i.e. the music itself was the problem.



As for what all this tells us about today, the report focuses on data that pre-dates the big shift of digital consumption from downloads to streams, so mainly identifies trends occurring in a specific moment of time. Though, given the disparity in ‘is file-sharing good or bad for music?’ reports over the years, it’s good to see one that acknowledges both outcomes and tries to balance one off another.